


20 Signs You're Dead Now- And Your Soul Is Immaterial

by beholdings



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Fix-It, M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Rating May Change, it's my fic and i get to choose who lives
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-11-27 05:35:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20943128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beholdings/pseuds/beholdings
Summary: Eddie Kaspbrak knew two things at once with sharp clarity. The first, was that he was a ghost. The second, was that he was haunting Richie Tozier [ON HOLD FOR SCHOOL]





	1. I Won't Pretend To Understand It

Richie Tozier shivered. The Derry townhouse was cold, as one might expect from a derelict hotel in the middle of Maine at the crack of dawn. He had been up for hours, saying goodbye to the last of the losers, Ben and Beverly, as they took their flight home. Home. Richie didn't know where that was anymore. Maybe he never had. He was a single, mediocre stand up comic in his forties with a sparsely decorated house in NoHo that only reminded him of his loneliness. He hadn’t felt so lonely, once in his life. Twenty-seven years ago, when he’d lived in Derry and shared an indescribable bond with six others who were just like him. He had even experienced love, once, another lifetime ago. Seeing Eddie Kaspbrak again reminded him of this. Of the cold hard fact that he had once been, always has been, and still is in love with a scrawny hypochondriac he had known since kindergarten.

He shivered again. He would have to go back eventually, to his life. It didn't feel like his anymore. It felt more like some sort of intermission between two acts in a Shakespearean tragedy. But life, as he knew, wasn’t some play or movie and it didn’t end after some dramatic, climactic event. At least, it didn’t end there for _most_ people. None of the losers had wanted to tell Myra about the passing of her husband. They didn't even know how to contact her, if they had wanted to tell her. They didn’t particularly want to speak to Patricia Uris either, knowing that even though they’d been so close-knit long ago, none of them had any stake in Stanley’s life, not anymore. Instead, both Eddie and Stan were left as the last missing children of Derry, the last casualty of the horrible evil that had lurked beneath its streets. It filled Richie with a never ending white-hot anger.

Eddies two suitcases lay in his unoccupied room, though it wasn’t completely unoccupied, as Richie stood in the middle of it, contemplating. His friends, his love, his life. He shivered a third time, cursing under his breath at how damn cold it was in Eddie’s room. One last punishment from the town of Derry for daring to exist within its borders, he supposed. Richie rubbed his arms and finally, finally gathered the strength to sling his own duffel over his shoulder then grab Eddie’s things-- his last living will and testament, the last evidence that Eddie had ever existed, really-- and made his way down the stairs, into his compensating-for-something midlife crisis sports car. Tears pricked at his eyes as he slammed the trunk down and got into the driver's seat, but he told himself he had cried enough. One last shaky breath and he started the car, and drove out of Derry for the very last time. As he crossed the town line, Richie turned up the heat. His car must have sat out in the morning fog of Maine for too long, he thought.

* * *

Eddie Kaspbrak always knew death would come for him. His own mother had hammered this fact into his head with a rusty nail and a 20 pound hammer since the day he was born. He always thought it would be something common, statistically speaking, like heart disease or a stroke or a car accident. Never in his careful, careful life did he even fathom that he would die in the arms of his best friend, having been stabbed through the torso by a giant, million year old killer clown from outer space. That made him sound a bit more heroic, he supposed. His dying act was saving trashmouth Tozier, making up for all the times he _hadn’t_ saved him. There had been quite a few of those, where Eddie had been frozen with fear and doubt, and another loser had to step in for him. Not this time. Not when it really counted.

Something else Eddie knew was that he _knew_ things. That was weird. He thought that, seeing as he was dead, he shouldn’t know things anymore. There was a vague sense of cold around his limbs, though he also knew he shouldn’t be feeling his limbs anymore. Hazy clouds of vapor drifted lazily by him, and he felt just as lazy as they were. Eddie wished he could sleep, but there was a nagging sense that there was something he had to be awake for. He huffed breathlessly, which did nothing to disturb the thick, inky fog that surrounded him. This would have been disconcerting to any normal person, but Edward Kaspbrak has been through a lot, especially in the last few days, so this was the least of his worries. Plus, he was dead, and having a logical (and for once, clear) mind, it made sense to him that a dead person wouldn’t have any real breath. What didn’t make any sense was why he was here-- wherever _here_ was.

Tentatively, he attempted to reach out a hand and examine it. Luckily, he still had control of his limbs, as deathly cold as they felt. Eddie saw his own hand, familiar and covered in blood which he knew to be his own. He clenched it into a fist and turned it around this way and that. He could even feel the weight of his wet jacket clinging to his forearm. The realization of these senses gave way to the rest of his body, a dull feeling hurriedly scrambling out of the way as pain tackled his body full force, like a college football linebacker during the Big Game. Eddie let out a noise, more breath than vocalization, and heard it echo around him. _God,_ he thought, _did death have to hurt this much?_ He looked down and found his own body, still soaked in greywater and still gaping through the torso. Looking at his wound only served to sharpen the pain, so he quickly grimaced and looked away. As he did, his vision swam, and colors shifted at the edge of the small void he found himself in. Fast wind began blowing past him, howling in his ears. The blackness of-- purgatory, the afterlife?-- gave way to scenery rushing by and the smell of a new car and the sound of hair metal mixed with static. Eddie found himself seated in a car, the passenger seat to be precise, looking down a long road surrounded by nothing. He heard a soft sob cut through the ridiculous noise flowing from the radio. Looking to his left, he found the driver of the car white-knuckling the steering wheel and holding back tears. Eddie Kaspbrak knew two things at once with sharp clarity. The first, was that he was a ghost. Second, was that he was haunting Richie Tozier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys! this is my first ever fic, and i wrote it in a fit of passion after leaving the theatre for IT CH 2 for the second time. that being said Please leave your comments/thoughts, i'd love to hear them!!!


	2. The Afterlife and All

It took Richie nearly the entire seventeen hour trip from Derry to his hotel in Illinois to stop crying. He hadn’t planned to drive for seventeen hours straight, but stopping didn’t even register as an option until he was in the middle of New York state, by which time he decided to stop to eat and piss, then stop on the road 20 minutes later to barf up the shitty Taco Bell he’d eaten. His tear ducts had given up by hour five, and the lump in his throat felt more like a tumbleweed made of barbed wire by hour ten, but he couldn’t find it in himself to stop. His friends all had their happy endings, relatively speaking. Ben and Beverly found their love for each other, Mike was off exploring the world he had missed, and Bill could finally write a fucking ending. Richie wished more than anyone had wished for anything before that Bill would write a new ending for him. For Eddie. He didn’t care if it involved him. He wouldn’t care if he never saw Edward Kaspbrak again for the rest of eternity, as long as he knew he was alive. But Bill was right. Even if the audience didn’t like it, life didn’t always work out with a song and dance and finish wrapped up in a neat little bow. Instead, Richie was sitting on the stiff sheets of a double-sized bed in a dimly lit motel room, seventeen hours away from the corpse of his best friend, which felt in and of itself like the punchline to the universe’s most sick joke. It struck him vaguely that Eddie would have killed him if he knew he was sleeping in blood soaked jeans in a categorically unsanitary bed, teeth unbrushed, skin covered in muck and grime and tears. He let out a wry laugh as he wiped his eyes before the tears dared to flow again._ I’ve had enough of that for today, _he thought, and drifted to sleep, feeling altogether too small and too alone and far too cold to be sleeping.

If he could touch him, he’d kill him. Eddie Kaspbrak would kill Richie for going to sleep in such a state. Eddie was sat up on the bed next to a sleeping Richie, unable to make his presence known besides the unearthly chill aura he brought with him all the way from the sewers of Derry, through the roads of Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Ohio, and Indiana...to here, covering Richie in the most uncomfortable blanket in history. He wished Richie had at least gotten under the covers, as caked with lord-knows-what as they were. Maybe then he wouldn’t be shivering, laying on his side facing away from Eddie, looking more like a newborn fawn about to freeze to death in the middle of winter than a sad 40 year old man. It was enough to make him cry, if he could. The only thing he _could_ do was bring his knees up to his chest, shifting the bed underneath him by nanometers.

“Being a ghost _sucks_,” he huffed, to no one in particular. He had found out quickly that nothing he said or did made Richie see him or hear him. He yelled and screamed until his ethereal vocal chords felt as though they would snap. He put his hand on Richie’s shoulder, his arm, covered his hands gripping the wheel of the car with his own. None of it served any purpose. After five hours he had given up, sinking low into the leather seat, letting Richie drive his ghost away from Derry, to wherever Richie was going. It was 5 am by the time the trashmouth had finally given into his exhaustion and stopped at the nearest open motel, just on the other side of Chicago. In spite of the tired that lined his eyes and called him to bed like a siren song, he dragged the suitcases- Eddie’s, not his, toiletry bag and all- out of the trunk and into his second floor room. Richie couldn’t bear the thought of leaving them out in the cold Illinois night in his shitty sports car, so up they went into an even shittier motel room with him. Which meant Eddie followed. He would follow him anywhere- it wasn’t as if he really had a choice. He wasn’t about to haunt Myra. He shuddered in disgust just at the thought. He couldn’t go torment the living souls of the other losers, not that he even knew how to get to them. Eddie hadn’t quite gotten the hang of being a ghost yet, only having figured out so far that his presence next to Richie meant Richie (and, subsequently the room around him), got _cold_. That, and he could affect things in the waking world, but only to an unnoticeable degree. He hoped with all his essence that these things took practice, and that one day he could get Richie to see him. He didn’t know what good it would do. He knew it would probably just open up some stitched together trauma within Richie and make things worse. But nothing was worse to him right now than the fact that he was here, sitting next to his grieving best friend, completely and utterly invisible.

* * *

  
Richie woke the next morning at 9 am, covered in sweat, eyebrows creased from a dream he couldn’t remember. He let out a shaky breath and rubbed his arms for warmth, “God, did they set the A/C in here to the _Ice Age_ setting? What the fuck?” Richie swung his legs over the edge of the bed, teeth chattering as he attempted to bring warmth back into his body. “Sorry,” Eddie said from his spot in the corner of the room, “that’s my fault.” Richie stood and sighed, looking about the room. He looked right over Eddie, which made his nonexistent breath hitch in his see-through throat. Richie’s eyes landed on the large suitcases he had left by the door, and Eddie followed his gaze there. He looked between them as if Richie had started a sexually intense staring contest with the luggage. After what felt like an eternity, Richie blinked and made a move towards them, tipping one onto its back with the gentleness of an historian laying down the most precious artifact the world had ever seen. He gripped the zipper, took a deep breath, and began to open it. Eddie watched, transfixed, as if he were a student watching a surgeon dissect a cadaver, except the body on the operating table were his own. “You’d better have a fucking jacket in here,” Richie said, “I know you packed for every single foreseeable situation, so there has to be at least one goddamned jacket in here Eds.”

Richie lifted the lid of the suitcase now that it was fully unzipped. “Don’t call me Eds, you pr-” Eddie couldn’t finish his sentence, for Richie had dipped a hand into his neatly folded clothes, but it felt more like Richie had plunged himself into Eddies organs. He didn’t know much about ghosts, never cared to with all that had happened to them, but he supposed now that there must have been a reason he’d followed Richie in his car rather than staying with his own body. Of course he was inhabiting his own meticulously designed luggage, of course Richie had hauled the incriminating object with him to wherever he was going. These two suitcases were, after all, filled with nearly all of his mortal property. He didn’t know why, but he’d stuffed it all in when he’d gotten that call from Mike. Myra must have barely a thing to remember him by. The thought couldn’t make him sad, couldn’t even make him pity his wife. The only thought he could coherently form was, well, nothing. He couldn’t think a damn thing as Richie finally found a jacket, rolled up and neatly tucked away in the bottom of the case, and he let out a breathless sigh as he watched Richie unroll it and grip it like a lifeline. He lay it on his lap and fought away another wave of tears. “Thanks for always being so prepared, Eddie.” The man in question could do nothing to say you’re welcome, or no problem, or make fun of Richie for being so vulnerable. All he could do was pray to whatever God existed that the jacket would protect his best friend from the cold front that now followed him everywhere. Richie looked back to the open suitcase and scrunched his face up in some semblance of both disgust and regret. “Sorry for messing up your stuff. I kinda needed this though,” he finally pulled on the old hoodie (of course, Eddie thought, that’s what he’d pick out of everything in there), “I’m not even gonna _attempt_ to put that shit back where it was.” And he didn’t. He closed the lid and zipped it back up unceremoniously, leaving Eddie feeling stitched back together, like he could breathe again. He let out a fluttering laugh. “Yeah, thanks for that, asshole.”


	3. 1 Weird Reason Why It’s Great To Be Ethereal

Now that Richie felt more like a balmy Winter’s day rather than the iceberg that sank the Titanic, he prepared to get back on the road. Before checking out of the motel, which made Eddie want to upheave now that he could see every stain in the clear light of day, Richie washed his face and wiped a small smudge off his glasses. He absentmindedly thought this would make Eddie happy if he could see him, and Eddie saw his newly cleaned face (he didn’t dare phase through the door to the bathroom while Richie was occupying it) and was made happy. They walked side by side to Richie’s car, Eddie making the gravel shift noiselessly. He was already in the passenger seat by the time Richie slammed the trunk on Eddie’s heavy, $145 dollar corporeal hosts, and went to work attempting to change the radio station. Richie hadn’t bothered changing it the whole drive from Derry, so it had drifted in and out of Spanish commercials, late-night Jazz deejays speaking nonsense about Gershwin, pop songs from the likes of Taylor Swift ( _ was she even popular anymore? _ Eddie had asked himself the 5th time he recognized her voice), all of it bookended by heavy static. Trying to turn the dial was fruitless, as it just slipped through his fingers like it was covered in hydrophobic spray and his hands were water. After either the second or hundredth try, he got frustrated and slammed his fist on the dashboard. The radio jumped at this, scattering through signals until finally landing on 91.7 FM, one of those “all oldies, all the time” stations. 

Richie jumped at this too, startled by the sudden change after an hour or so of nothing but the hiss of universal background radiation pouring from his car’s speakers. “Weird…,” he said under his breath, staring for a moment at the car’s stereo as if it had a life of its own. This wasn’t quite true, though it was close. Eddie stared at it just as wide-eyed, then looked at Richie. He considered for a moment if punching him, like he had the dashboard, would get him somewhere. He decided against it as he watched Richie relax back in his seat, having blamed the sudden change on a bump in the road he hadn’t noticed. He began singing along to the song, something Eddie vaguely recognized from when they were teens but didn’t remember any of the words to, and a smile tugged at both of their lips. Slowly, Eddie watched as Richie relaxed even further, beating out the rhythm to the song and yelling out lyrics decidedly off key. He didn’t care. He had done this. He looked at Richie, who was driving down a long stretch of empty Iowan highway with his soul in tow, Richie who had  _ his _ jacket on, Richie who was, for the first time in over 24 hours, happy. There was nothing on Richard Tozier’s mind now but the open road and some shitty song by the Cure and that was the only thing that mattered to Eddie.

* * *

The rest of the drive was uneventful. Richie stopped a few times to eat something, keeping it down each time. The road was fairly empty and free of traffic, which Eddie was grateful for. They eventually stopped at a comparatively nicer motel than the last, somewhere on the west end of Colorado. Richie still carried Eddie’s suitcases with him inside, but this time he brought his own duffel into the room. Once settled, he fished into his own luggage and found clean clothes: a t-shirt reading “ORGASM DONOR” in large red letters with a red cross, which made Eddie snort and roll his eyes, a pair of sweatpants embroidered with a small logo for Bass Pro Shop, and a pair of overworn plaid briefs. The entire outfit screamed Richie Tozier. He lifted himself from the floor and threw the clothes he’d picked onto the bed and began stripping in the middle of the room. 

Eddie didn’t know if ghosts could blush, but if they could, he assumed he’d be redder than a sunburned ICU patient with rosacea at the sight of Richie taking off his clothes. Luckily, he was only frozen long enough to see Richie take off Eddie’s hoodie, after which he promptly power walked to the other side of the room and planted himself there, staring at the wall until he heard the bathroom door click shut, the water of the shower turn on,  _ and _ the shower curtain sing out the telltale noise of being yanked closed. Eddie let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding (nor had he needed to hold, since he did not breathe) and turned around. He saw his own hoodie neatly and meticulously folded on the bed, while Richie’s other clothes had been thrown on the ground as if they had offended him. Looking at the sewage and blood clinging to the fibers, he decided that they offended him too.

Richie didn’t look at himself in the mirror as he passed it to get into the shower. He didn’t want to see himself the way he was, hugged on nearly every surface by old blood and the remnants of greywater, all mixed together with the salt of his own sweat and tears. Instead he let the water pelt him, boiling on his skin and steaming away his tension and his grime, letting out a large sigh. His eyes shut softly and he focused on the sting of the hot water and the sound of it hitting the tub below him. Richie took a shuddering breath, but he didn’t cry. He didn’t have it in him anymore, after all the tears he had shed over the course of just one day. He tried to think of Eddie, but it made his throat close up like an allergic reaction, so he thought of anything else instead. He thought of the mess he’d left in his fancy North Hollywood house, of the gymnastics he’d have to go through to explain to his agent why on God’s green Earth he disappeared without a trace in the middle of his tour. A laugh left him through his nose at the insignificance his comedic career held after the past few days. He found himself wondering if he could cancel the tour, get some shitty job and lay low for a while. Maybe he could even start writing his own material. That thought gave him a genuine laugh, though it came out biting and bitter. So, instead of thinking of anything at all, he let his mind go blank as he finished cleaning himself, scrubbing every inch of himself until no trace of Derry could be seen or felt.

Eddie didn’t blame Richie for being in the shower for so long. He checked the clock every so often, and by the time he heard the pipes groan to signal that the water had been shut off, he’d been in the bathroom for an hour and thirty seven minutes. In any case, Eddie was grateful. He had used this time to attempt to organize Richie’s things. He started with the clothes Richie had left on the floor. Eddie found that the closet had one of those bags that motels sometimes supply for your dirty clothes, but he only knew this because he had poked his head  _ through _ the closet door itself. Getting it open, let alone grabbing the bag and getting the clothes inside it, was another matter altogether. Ever since the incident with the radio Eddie had found, through trial and error during one of Richie’s rest stops on the way here, that if he had enough conviction (and/or used enough force) he could influence objects in the real world. It took all of twelve entire minutes, seeing as this was his first time moving a door as a ghost, but he managed to slide it open enough for him to grab the bag. This took quite a lot of cartoonish pushing, pulling, huffing, and puffing on his end, but he was still quite proud that he did it. Grabbing the dirty clothes bag didn’t take so long as convincing the door to open, but some effort was still required. Being a ghost, Eddie decided, was a lot of work.

In total it took him about an hour to coax the bag out of the closet, and forcibly manhandle Richie’s discarded clothes into the bag, but he was satisfied with his work. Next came folding the clothes Richie had plucked ever-so-haphazardly from his duffel. To Eddie’s pleasure, this took nowhere near as long as his other task. Perhaps it was because folding clothes was something he had liked to do quite a lot while he was alive. Or perhaps he was getting better at being a ghost. Either way, by the time Richie stepped out of the shower, Eddie had displayed the clothes neatly (though he hadn’t dared to touch his own jacket. Richie had taken such care to fold it, it felt to Eddie a bit sacreligious to move it) on the bed, including the warmest pair of, albeit mismatched, socks Eddie could find lurking within his duffel. 

Richie sighed a final time as he shut off the water. His fingertips were shriveled horribly, the only sign to him that he had been in the shower for what could be considered a “long fucking time.” He groped for a towel and wrapped it around his waist, not bothering to use it for its intended purpose and dry himself off. He simply stepped out onto the bathmat and examined himself in the mirror, leaning over the sink and wiping steam off the glassy surface. All he could see was the vague impression of a stubbly, wet, sad man looking back at him. He rubbed a shaky hand over the gaunt underneath his cheekbone, feeling the too-long stubble there. He’d need to clean himself up when he finally made his way back to his place (not  _ home, _ he didn’t know where that was and hadn’t for 27 years). For now he could be disheveled and messy. It wasn’t as if anyone important could see him like this. Something in the back of his mind wondered if maybe Eddie could see him from wherever he was, and  _ God _ he hoped not. He hoped and prayed that Eddie couldn’t see the pathetic man in the mirror in front of him. He was unrecognizable to himself, not just because he didn’t have his glasses on. He sighed a final,  _ final _ time and put them on, still cracked and still a bit bloody- he didn’t think he’d ever have the heart to clean them, he’d get a new pair later- and padded out of the bathroom without looking back into the mirror.

Richie dripped his way back into the bedroom, leaving a trail of wet behind him, but stopped short when he saw the bed. He could have  _ sworn _ he didn’t fold those clothes. It didn’t seem like him to fold them anyways. Eddie watched him as he stared at the clothes, but Richie simply shook his head and reached for his neatly laid out boxers. Eddie’s eyes followed his hand to them, and as quickly as Richie’s towel dropped so he could put on his underwear, Eddie put his hands in front of his eyes. A crease formed between Richie’s eyebrows as he pulled on his boxers over his still wet legs, troubled by the feeling that someone was watching him. This was of course, untrue. Eddie was watching anything else in the room  _ but _ him. Though, cosmic feelings of being watched could hardly differentiate between Eddie staring at Richie and pointedly standing up, turning his back, and staring at the wall across from Richie. The only thing that mattered to whatever force doled out things like the-feeling-of-being-watched was that Eddie was in the same room as Richie, and Richie couldn’t see him. The feeling made Richie shiver but he forced himself to think nothing of it, having been plagued with plenty of these thoughts since he left Derry. He chalked it up as lingering feelings of dread that It had left with them all. The feeling had been fully shaken by the time he pulled on his shirt and his sweats and, more gently, put on Eddies jacket. Comfort seeped in from the fleece lined hoodie and saturated Richie’s very being. 

He climbed into the king sized bed, under the covers this time, and settled with his back against the headboard. Even after a long and boiling shower, he didn’t quite feel like falling asleep yet. Instead, he grabbed his phone from the bedside table and opened Twitter, pointedly ignoring the 29 voicemails his agent had left, and less pointedly, more guiltily, ignoring the texts Beverly and Bill had sent him. He felt more like looking at mindless social media than facing the real world. As if some paper thin space between Eddie being dead and Eddie being really, undeniably  _ dead _ would be shattered if he spoke to his friends. So rather than crumple up the small sliver of hope- if he could even call it that- he sits and stares at his screen in the dark room. Eddie laughs with him when he chuckles at some meme or video, and sits in silence with him as Richie becomes ever more tired. Eventually he falls asleep, and Eddie uses all his strength to move Richie into some semblance of a comfortable horizontal position, pulling the duvet up to his shoulders. He sits watching Richie’s chest rise and fall in the soft moonlight, reminded of so many times he’d done so when they were teens. Though he’d never admit it, Richie had always been his favorite. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t care to question it. Maybe that’s just what it meant to have a best friend. Maybe that’s why the cosmic, ineffable forces of the universe had placed him within the suitcases Richie carts with him, rather than with Bill or Mike or Ben or Beverly, or even with Stan, wherever he was. Whatever the reason, he was grateful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heyooo! so this chapter is quite a lot longer than the first two, but i had a lot to say. hope you enjoyed it!!


	4. I've Been So Lonely Since You Died

After one final long-ass stint of driving, the last few hours of which involved a lot of stress for Eddie as his involuntary chauffeur navigated the busy freeways of California, they were home. Or, as close to a home as Richie had, really. Eddie supposed his suitcases were his home now, though that sounded shitty, so he didn’t think about it too much. Instead, he looked up the driveway leading to the house Richie owned. His comedian salary must be pretty hefty if he could afford something like  _ this. _ It was large, sleek and modern, all concrete and flat white surfaces and large windows and an unmanicured “lawn,” if it could be called that. It was more like a haphazard smattering of overgrown plants all competing for breathing room. He assumed it must have looked like a real landscape at some point in time, but it was extremely characteristic of Richie to not give a single fuck about lawn maintenance. Richie was hauling Eddie’s literal and metaphysical baggage up to the front door, along with his own small duffel bag. Eddie wished he could help, but he didn’t want to freak Richie out by making a suitcase move on its own. That was the last thing Richie needed right now. What he needed was to get the fuck inside and  _ why do I have so many keys _ he thought as he fumbled through his key ring for the one that would open the front door. It took a few more tries, it felt like he could have been standing there trying each key for either a year or a minute, but he was finally in. Richie let out a long, deep sigh as he crossed through the threshold. 

Eddie hesitated. He considered the options that were before him. Does he step into Richie’s private home, bringing in the cold? Where else could he go? How far could he get from those stupid suitcases before he had to turn right back around? Questions plagued his mind as he stood before the entrance to Richie’s home, frozen. It was his job to analyze risk, after all. Are there physical symptoms to being haunted? Would it affect Richie? And, worst of all, he thought  _ would Richie be okay with me haunting him? _ It wasn’t as if he had had any choice in the matter, but didn’t just want to nonconsensually infest Richie’s environment with his spirit. It seemed violating, in a way. Sure, they’d been close as kids, but there was a looming 27 year gap in their friendship. What kind of bro just crashes at his best friend’s place after dying in his arms? Eddie rationalized that their specific scenario probably never happened in the history of, like,  _ ever, _ but he wasn’t one to not obsess over the little details. God, could a ghost hyperventilate? He wished he had his aspirator. That holy portable shrine of sickly-sweet pressurized corticosteroids was rotting down with his body beneath the streets of Derry. He didn’t need it now that he was dead but  _ oh God he needed it and he wished he was home please I don’t want to be here please let me go home-- _

Eddie’s moment of panic was cut short by a noise, and a sudden jolt. Richie shut the front door and locked it, and wheeled Eddie’s luggage into the hallway towards his bedroom, and Eddie’s vision shifted all at once. It was just like when he’d first become aware he was a ghost; everything in sight melted into an impressionist painting of his environment, then changed, and suddenly he was standing next to Richie who was shutting the door of the closet he’d just carefully placed Eddies proverbial corpses in. He heaved a long sigh, needlessly catching his breath, at the same time that Richie shivered with the chill Eddie had brought with him. It seemed as if the universe had gotten fed up with Eddie’s hesitancy and made the decision for him, no matter the consequences it would have on Richie. This made Eddie’s brow furrow, and something in his chest, still burning with a searing pain he had gotten used to over the past 24 hours, flared with worry for his best friend. It was certainly the least of his worries, but he really didn’t want Richie to be so cold all the time, especially not because of  _ him. _ But what if there were other adverse effects of haunting? What would Eddie do then? 

Richie didn’t remember his house ever being so cold. Hell, it had never in his memory been this cold in any building within the state of California. His fancy touchscreen smart-thermostat indifferently displayed the numbers 52, and Richie wondered out loud if he’d brought some sort of curse back with him from Derry, to which the ghostly figure beside him winced, unseen. Eddie decidedly did not like being called a curse, whether inadvertently or not. Yet, at the same time, it wasn’t wholly inaccurate. It was all he could do to simply watch as Richie turned the heater up to 80 and shoved his hands in the pocket of Eddie’s hoodie. He wanted oh, so desperately, to do something that would tell Richie he was here. But what would that accomplish? As much as Eddie wanted to be seen, everything in him told him not to disturb the easy tranquility Richie had settled into. He seemed to be doing okay--he hadn’t shed a tear since Colorado, and he wanted it to stay that way. If Richie never cried again in his life, Eddie would be content. So rather than knock over one of the trashmouth’s expensive vases, or write him a post-it note from the afterlife, or anything else he could have done, he took one last look at Richie, who now had his back turned to him. Nodding only to himself, Eddie walked away to find a place he could hide away, hoping to centralize his heat-sucking incorporeal aura somewhere Richie wouldn’t frequent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey!! sorry for the late update!!! next chapter should be up soon :^)


	5. I've Tried To Walk Towards the Light

Five days had passed since that fateful night in Derry, Maine. It took Richie two days to finally answer any of his friends’ texts or calls. He assured them that he was alright, putting on a smile and lying through his teeth at them, saying he was going to call his agent and go back on tour soon. They all were placated by this, though still wary of Richie’s state. All six of them- Patricia Uris had contacted the five of them three days after Derry, informing them that Stan had made a miraculous recovery, having been rushed to the ICU  _ just _ fast enough- promised to meet in LA whenever Richie decided his show would begin again, and to stay in touch this time. To him, it all felt empty without Eddie. It was cruel that whatever miracle (however grateful for it he was) that brought Stan the Man back, didn’t care to look Eddie’s way. He cursed himself for the millionth time for letting himself get dragged away from Neibolt, cursed himself for not taking Eddie to a hospital or dying there by his side. His brow furrowed, his mouth dipped into a frown, tears began to prick at his eyes- but he was snapped out of his ruminating by an ice cold shock that spread itself over his shoulders. 

This was, unbeknownst to Richie, because Eddie couldn’t stand to sit there and watch him cry. Eddie didn’t know  _ why _ Richie looked so upset, but it pained him to see it anyways, so he set his freezing ghostly hands onto his shoulders, sinking through his jacket and his shirt, seeping right into his skin. Eddie grimaced, imagining how cold it must have felt, but he would rather have Tozier feel the sting of his cadaver-cold hands than the sting of tears, no matter why they were being shed.

“God!” Richie yelled as the cold sunk into his bones, and Eddie sucked in a sympathetic breath through a grimace, “why the  _ fuck _ is it so cold?!” He shot up from his seat at the dining room tablet, knocking the chair onto its back, rubbing his shoulders and power walking to the living room, hurriedly snatching up some throw blanket he vaguely remembered receiving as a house warming present over his shoulders. He squeezed his eyes shut and huffed, a small billow of steam leaving his mouth as he did, willing the blanket and Eddie’s jacket to do their work. He hadn’t stopped wearing the jacket since he’d fished it out of Eddie’s gigantic suitcase. It gave him a small level of comfort, and he’d probably never stop wearing it for as long as he lived. If Richie could help it, he’d be buried wearing the thing. He didn’t look good in suits anyways. Death would look better on him if he were in a pair of jeans and this plain, dark green, fleece lined sweatshirt. 

A day or so ago Richie had finally left the house, only to go to his doctor. He was convinced he  _ had _ to be sick, with these cold flashes he kept getting. He must have caught something in the greywater of the sewers, and oh, how Eddie would lecture him for that. But as soon as he reached the fancy, too-expensive clinic, he was feeling just fine in the California heat. His doctor took his temperature, a normal 98.7 degrees Fahrenheit, stuck him with a needle and sent his blood to a lab. The results came back perfectly normal, if not a little high in cholesterol and low in Vitamin D, and he left feeling more confused than ever and toting a new thousands of dollars medical bill. It didn’t make any sense. Then again, many things hadn’t made sense in his life, including surviving a homophobic, child eating clown. So he eventually decided these localized blizzards within his body and home we’re just another result of tussling with forces beyond his understanding. Didn’t mean he had to like it though. And  _ fuck _ , he did  _ not _ like it.

Eddie hated himself for being the source of Richie’s discomfort. He had fallen into a sort of invisible domesticity over the past few days. He’d attempted to stay in a spare bedroom out of Richie’s way, but he couldn’t help himself from bothering his unwitting roommate. It tore him apart worse than the spike through his chest to just sit there and not check up on him. So he woke Richie up with a cold touch in the morning, urging him to get out of bed and do something with his life. He sat with him at the kitchen table while Richie scrolled through his social media, answering him whenever Richie spoke out loud, as if they were having a conversation. “When the fuck did I make tea?,” Richie would say after waking up from a nap on the couch, finding a still steaming cup of Earl Grey on the coffee table in front of him. “You didn’t, dipshit,” Eddie would say, since it was him that had painstakingly made the tea for him while he slept. But Richie didn’t hear him, and didn’t seem to care that it wasn’t him that had made the tea. It was there and it was warm and it was comforting, so he drank it. The tea was always exactly how he liked it- Eddie had taken care of a sick Richie in Derry way back when to remember just how much sugar and milk to put in- and Richie thought this must be because he had made it himself. He had been living in a stupor ever since arriving back here, going through the daily motions of sleeping and eating and texting Beverly then eating again and sleeping again and repeating. A little mysterious tea or the mail appearing on the table or waking up tucked in when he’d fallen asleep on an unmade bed, well, those things didn’t seem too out of the ordinary to him.

Eddie sat next to him on the couch. Well, not next to him. He sat on the opposite end of the couch- he wanted more than anything to be right next to him, to feel Richie’s residual warmth, but he was like a sponge for heat. If he sat too close, Richie would start shivering again and his breath would become a haze rather than an invisible wind. So he would always sit on the other side of the couch, or on the loveseat across from it, keeping his distance. He watched now as Richie pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders, huddling in on himself. Eddie’s mouth closed into a tight line as he watched Richie shudder with sobs rather than cold. Sometimes shocking him out of his negative thinking with a chill wasn’t enough. Richie sat there, knees to his chest and head down, crying as if no one could hear him or see him. “Eddie,” he gasped out. The man in question could do nothing but watch with a pained expression. He wouldn’t know what to say, even if Richie  _ could _ hear him. “I wish it’d been me instead of you, Eds,” Richie croaked. His voice was wrecked from the crying. “I wish I was down in the rubble, not you. It’s not fair,” he hiccuped, “that I’m here and you’re not.” Eddie sighed. This was the first time he’d heard Richie say anything out loud about it since they’d gotten here. It pained him to no end, shredding the hole in his chest impossibly wide, eviscerating him. “Don’t say that, Rich,” he whispered, his voice feather soft.

Richie froze. He kept his forehead against his knees, but he kept still, reigning in his breath. He could have sworn he just heard someone say something. Not just  _ any  _ someone. This had to be one final cruel trick from Pennywise, to torture him. Maybe he deserved it, after all his comments and teasing in middle school. Maybe trashmouths like him had nothing but torment in store for them. He took a shuddering breath and let it out slowly. “It’s true, though,” he answered back, humoring his hallucination, and Eddie’s eyes went wide, “it shoulda- it should have been me.” Richie didn’t dare look up. Didn’t want to see anything in addition to hearing it. Instead, he sat there waiting for another whisper, another trick of the mind. Eddies eyebrows furrowed deep, and he leaned forward. He looked like he could shatter at any moment. “Rich…” he reached out, slow as molasses trying to push its way through so much Jell-o, and rested a hand on Richie’s shoulder. It should have surprised him to see the fabric of Richie’s- his- jacket give way underneath his shaking palm, but the only thing he could focus on was the curls on the back of his friend’s head. 

Richie, however, was  _ very _ surprised to feel a hand on his shoulder. He let go of his legs and shot up straight, head snapping to the left. He looked at his shoulder and saw a hand, connected to an arm, which his eyes trailed up to a shoulder and further still to a head. There before him, he saw Eddie Kaspbrak, staring at him, mouth agape and doey eyes wide under lowered brows. After a moment, which seemed to both of them like an eternity, two things happened instantaneously: Eddie incredulously asked if Richie could see him at the very same moment that Richie involuntarily closed his eyes and fainted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the cliffhanger :^) the next chapter should be up in the next few days!!


	6. I'm Sorry I Left, But It Was For The Best

“...ichie? Richie, buddy?” Richie groaned as the world came back into focus. He squeezed his eyes before opening them and blinking, only to be greeted with the worried face of Eddie Kaspbrak looking down on him like a child staring into a fishbowl. When Eddie noticed Richie had woken up, he gave an attempt at a smile. “Hey, you’re awa-” before he could finish his sentence, Richie shot up from where he lay. Had Eddie been corporeal, they would have knocked foreheads, but Richie’s face went right through his own which made Eddie stumble backwards, hitting the back of his knees on the table, forcing him to sit down on it. He rubbed his face, feeling like every atom of his brain had just been steeped in Richard Tozier sauce for about a decade even though they’d touched for less than a second. “God, give a guy a warning, would you trashmouth?” Eddie tasted a sort of acrid wetness in the back of his mouth, and he decided then and there to never phase through another living person as long as he remained a ghost. “I- guh- give _you_ a warning?!” Richie spat out. He was huddled on the far side of the couch, shaking vehemently and staring unblinkingly at Eddie, a deer-in-headlights expression plastered on his face. It was like he was caught in the deadlights again, but instead of death and terror and unimaginable suffering he was looking into the halfway opaque face of his lifelong crush. He didn’t know which was worse. “_You’re_ the one who fucking materialized in _my_ house a week after you d-” Richie swallowed dryly, “a week after I saw you die! What the _fuck?!”_ Eddie cringed, still partly reeling from having been passed through, partly from the sudden hike in volume of Richie’s voice. “Look, dude, it’s not _my_ fault! You’ve been looking right through me for like six whole days, how was I supposed to know you’d suddenly react to my presence?” 

“S...six _whole days?_”

“Well...yeah. My, uh, ghost is sort of. Attached to my suitcases. And- and you dragged those-”

“Your what??”

“My suitcases, keep up, dick- you dragged them with you all the way here with you-”

“No you fucking idiot, I meant your _ghost_!”

“Oh.”

“Yeah! You mind fucking explaining that one to me?”

Eddie got up then, planting his hands indignantly on his hips, walking away from Richie but still talking. “I don’t fuckin’ know, man! I remember It stabbed me, then I died, then I woke up in the passenger seat of your car as you drove away from Derry.” He turned back around to face him then, but his eyes were on the ceiling as he rambled on, exasperated, hardly noticing he was walking through the coffee table in front of Richie. “I think my, uh, soul? Is attached to my suitcases. ‘Cause you took ‘em in your car and toted them across the entire god damned country and then you dragged them up the driveway to your fancy ass NoHo rich person house and I literally couldn’t _not_ follow you inside, like, physically I _had _to. But you couldn’t see me or hear me so I’ve just been sitting around watching you mope but I can move things if I try really hard so I’ve been making you tea and pulling the blankets up on you,” Eddie quickly glanced at Richie, “because your sad sorry ass doesn’t know how to take care of itself but then I saw you crying just now and you said my name out loud for the first time since we left Maine and I just got so _sad,_” Eddie stopped in his tracks then, completely out of breath despite the fact that he didn’t require oxygen, and looked at Richie. The other man was staring at him, halfway between mystified and mortified. In true Kaspbrak fashion, Eddie had been pacing the entire time he fast-talked, but his path took his legs through the table and Richie’s cheap souvenir ashtray rattled slightly each time Eddie walked through it. For possibly the first time in his life, Richie was at a loss for words. He just kept staring at Eddie, who was still needlessly panting after talking so much and was staring right back at him.

It took a moment, but Richie finally pulled something to say from deep within his throat. “I...that was you? All those cold spots? The- the tea?” he asked breathlessly, as if asking would make Eddie disappear or fade away for good. But he was still there, and he had a sort of simulacrum of guilt written on his face. “Yeah. I’m sorry, about the cold. I think it’s just what happens around you when you’re a ghost.” Richie shook his head and clamored up off the couch, keeping his eyes on Eddie. He walked right up to him and ever so carefully brought a hand up to his face. It was cold, so cold he thought his fingers might freeze and fall off right then and there, but he could feel it. He could feel the soft skin of Eddie’s cheek, halfway between a solid and a mist, and before he could stop them there were tears streaming down his own cheeks. They fell from his eyes with reckless abandon and they stung more than ever, clinging to his skin like ice crystals, but he didn’t care. He lunged forward and wrapped his arms around Eddies almost-there form, burying his head in the crook where Eddie’s neck met his shoulders. It was cold, it was unbelievably cold and he felt like he could die but he couldn’t die, not when he was hugging his best friend. Eddie stiffened and winced, the sudden embrace making the pain under his sternum flare, his ghostly vision whiting out for a mere moment, but he didn’t care either. He ignored it all and wound his arms around Richie, gripping the jacket he wore like a lifeline.

To the outside observer, it would look as if Richie was embracing nothing but air, as though he had gotten alarmingly good at finding the exact placement of the arms and head for hugging an invisible person. Maybe he’d taken a particularly emotional improv class, they would think, and move on with their day. But if that observer had a keen eye, they would also see the way Richie’s unkempt hair flattened as Eddie’s invisible, albeit wounded, cheek lay against it, or the way Richie’s-- _Eddie’s_\-- jacket bundled up in certain places as it was gripped tight by his similarly invisible hands. None of this mattered, however, for there _were_ no outside observers. As far as they were concerned, they were the only two beings who existed in the entire universe, living or dead. And it was like this that they stayed, for a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we're getting somewhere folks!!


End file.
